Mercor made its founders the world’s youngest self-made tech billionaires with a business built on the human expertise behind AI systems.
By the time Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha were 22, the numbers around their startup had begun to bend the usual Silicon Valley timeline.
Just two years after they launched the AI recruiting startup that connects companies with vetted experts to evaluate and train AI systems, Mercor had already been valued in the billions. It wasn’t long before major business outlets were openly describing the trio as among the world’s youngest self-made tech billionaires.
In hindsight, Mercor’s unusual rapid rise can look sudden – a startup that appears to mint three 22-year-old billionaires in under three years – but the premise is easy to grasp.
As AI systems spread into more consequential work, someone has to decide whether those systems are correct. And that “someone” is rarely a generalist.
The responsibility lies with a domain expert – an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, an analyst – who can evaluate outputs, write rigorous tests, and generate the specialized training data that turns a demo into a dependable product.
Mercor and the billion-dollar business of AI hiring
In interviews, the founders have emphasized that progress often bottlenecks in evaluation rather than model architecture. It’s a position that helps explain why a startup positioned as a ‘recruiting’ firm can sit so close to the core of the AI stack.
The company’s fundraising story traces the acceleration. In February 2025, Mercor announced that it had raised a $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, noting the founders’ uncommon profile as a trio of 21-year-old Thiel Fellows.
Just five months earlier, it was reported that Mercor had been valued at $250 million. The platform had processed 300,000 candidates and conducted more than 100,000 interviews since launch. These were early indicators of the scale it was aiming for in a labor market that typically moves slowly.
The story quickly shifted again. In October 2025, Mercor raised a $350 million in its Series C funding round at a $10 billion valuation.
That $10 billion mark was the inflection point behind the framing of the youngest self-made tech billionaires. At that valuation, meaningful founder ownership – despite being diluted over successive rounds – can translate, on paper, into ten-figure net worth.
Three high school friends building the human backbone of AI
Forbes explicitly linked Mercor’s reported $10 billion valuation to the founders becoming the youngest self-made tech billionaires, placing all three co-founders at the center of a new kind of wealth story. One where the fastest route isn’t necessarily building the model, but owning a critical layer that many model teams end up needing.
In a conversation with Fortune, Foody described Mercor as the product of a scrappier origin. Three high school friends, one side project, and an early willingness to run toward the unglamorous work of building supply where the market was thin.
Taken together, the throughline has been consistent. From the start, Mercor has positioned itself inside the “human-in-the-loop” economy, emphasizing the operational challenge of finding, screening, and deploying credible experts at speed.
Then, they followed through with that promised it reliably enough for top AI teams to treat that expert supply chain as infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.
